The Billionaire Beast(22)

He’d been meaning to discuss the upcoming meeting with her, but that was all gone now. There was only one thing clear in his head. “I want you, Phoebe,” he murmured against her lips. “Right now. Right here.”

She pulled away from him at that, and he let her, but he didn’t move away, keeping her pinned against the wall with his body. Her hand came out, but not to push at him the way she had last night. It simply rested on his chest, a small vital warmth. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.” Her voice was so very calm, and yet he could hear the faint husk to it. She wasn’t as unaffected as she seemed. “We are actually working together if you hadn’t noticed. You’re my boss after all.”

“I don’t give a fuck.” He nuzzled against her neck, brushing his mouth over the quickening pulse at the base of her throat. “It’s too late for that anyway, especially after last night.”

She shivered, the soft sound of her breath in his ear. “I have a meeting, don’t forget.”

Ah, Christ. The goddamn meeting. He’d love her to skip it, but he couldn’t. Not this one. He needed her to be there.

Reluctantly Nero lifted his head, looking down in her face. “After the meeting,” he insisted.

Her thumb moved on his chest, a simple back and forth motion, absent almost. Yet it sent ripples of a strange kind of pleasure through him, pleasure that wasn’t entirely sexual. Like he was a cat and she was stroking him.

“Nero,” she began.

But he didn’t let her finish. “I want you,” he said again, so she was absolutely aware. “I want you to be my lover.” And because he didn’t know how else to get her to agree or what else he could give her that wasn’t money, he added a word he never used. “Please.”

That caressing thumb stopped, her gaze deep, fathomless. “Yes,” she said simply. “I’ll be your lover.”

The breath went out of him, because he hadn’t known how badly he’d wanted her to say yes until this moment. “You want this, too?” It came out as a demand, but he couldn’t help it. And was a shock to realize he wanted her to agree because she wanted him, not because he’d forced her into it.

She gave a slow nod. “I do.”

Relief spread through him, and he raised his hands, cupping her face between his palms, unable to resist the urge to kiss her.

“On one condition,” Phoebe added.

He tensed, a sudden and inexplicable fear going through him. “What condition?” he asked roughly, in no mood for games.

“You tell me why you have landscapes everywhere.”

It wasn’t what he was expecting and it caught him off guard. For a second he didn’t know what she was talking about. Then he did. The paintings . . .

He’d started to collect them when he’d bought this house, and over the years had bought more and more. Pictures of places he would never go to. Places he would never see. He used to walk the hallways looking at them until he’d found the hallways too high, too wide, too big, retreating to his office where everything wasn’t so large. Where he had everything he needed.

He eased himself back from her. “I like art. And I don’t like people. Landscapes are the best of both worlds.” Now she wasn’t right up next to him, he was conscious again that he wasn’t in his familiar set of rooms and that the emptiness of the hallway at his back felt like it was pressing down hard.

You should have waited for her in your office. People are supposed to come to you. You don’t go to them.

But he had gone to her. He’d been impatient. And now he was here in this hallway that felt like it went on forever, his office too far away. His heartbeat began to speed up again, his breath getting short.

Fuck, if he didn’t leave right now she would know. She would see . . .

“Tell me about them on the way to your office,” Phoebe said, her husky voice cutting through the rising feelings of suffocation. “I’ve got a favorite, just along here.”

She began to walk down the hall toward the chasm of the stairs and he found himself following her as if he was in the darkness and she carried the only source of light.

As they walked, she pointed out a couple of pictures, asking him questions about them, and he found himself answering. The aching emptiness at his back and over his head receded slightly.

Farther along was a panorama taken by a famous climber of the sun rising at the top of Mt. Everest, and she stopped in front of it. “This is my favorite,” she murmured. “It’s amazing.”

He told her who’d taken it and where, then he asked. “Why do you like it?” He’d never felt the need to know before. These pictures were for him and no one else, so why the fuck did he care why she liked it? Yet he did.

“I’m not sure,” she said slowly, studying the picture. “You’re standing there, at the highest point of the world, looking at everything around you. And the sun’s coming up and it’s . . . beautiful. It feels like freedom. Absolute freedom.”

The words hit him in a way he couldn’t have described, making something echo inside him. He couldn’t stop staring at her face as she looked at the painting, sharp and vivid. “Freedom?” he repeated, like a goddamn idiot.

“Yes.” She glanced at him then back to the photo. “It’s sunrise and it’s morning, and there are a thousand new beginnings in that photo. It makes me want to spread my arms and just jump off the mountain. Fly.”

Fly. She wanted to fly.

Nero dragged his gaze from her face back to the photo. To the sunrise and the limitless view everywhere. There were no walls in that picture, no barriers, no boundaries . . .

His lungs abruptly felt like they were in a vice or weighted down by concrete, and he couldn’t make them expand. Couldn’t get a fucking breath. The corridor he hadn’t walked down for years getting longer and longer, the walls soaring into the sky, the space above him pressing him down . . .

His heartbeat was like thunder and he was conscious that his breathing was audible and sharp. Jesus Christ, if he wasn’t careful, he was going to fucking lose it right in front of her.

Then unexpectedly, warm fingers laced through his, jolting his awareness from the emptiness all around, making the air rush back in into his lungs as if an oxygen mask had been jammed on his face.

Phoebe wasn’t looking at him, turning already toward the stairs, keeping her fingers threaded through his. “Come on,” she said in her usual calm and steady way. “We’d better get to your office. I know you have some information you want to go over with me.”

He knew she’d seen his vulnerability in that moment. And it made him want to push her away, tear his hand from hers and go straight to the safety of his control room, hide himself. Protect himself. Because he couldn’t bear it if anyone knew. If she knew.

But he didn’t do any of those things.

He simply tightened his fingers around hers and held her hand all the way back to his office.

* * *

Charles’s room in the private hospital was small, but the sun came right into it, laying a shining trail across the foot of his bed.

Phoebe had particularly liked that. A little piece of the outside world touching him. Not that he would ever know, but when she’d first brought him here, she thought it would be something nice to tell him when he woke up.

If he ever woke up.

Phoebe tucked in the sheet that had come untucked at the end of the bed then smoothed down the coverlet, a reflexive gesture. Then she moved over to the shelf where the flowers from her last visit drooped. Taking them out, she replaced them with the sunflowers she’d found in the florist just down the street. They didn’t smell—not like the roses—but she liked the bright, joyful color and thought that maybe there was a part of him that was conscious, that saw what she was doing and liked them, too.

Dumping the dead roses in the trash, she turned back to the sunflowers and tweaked the arrangement, humming along to the show tune she had playing quietly on her phone. He might be able to hear music, they’d told her. And voices, too, so keep talking and play him songs he might like.

So she did. Every single visit.

Turning from the sunflowers, she cast her eye over the room, looking for something to tidy or put back in place, because sitting down in the chair beside Charles’s bed wasn’t something she liked to do. Not when it felt too much like sitting beside someone’s grave.

She shouldn’t be here, not when Nero had given her strict instructions to come back home immediately after she’d finished her meeting with Lorenzo, Nero’s rather scary half-brother. But she’d needed to come and see Charles. She hadn’t visited since she’d started working for Nero, and she’d needed the reminder of her real life, of what she should be thinking about instead of being consumed by Nero’s relentless, magnetic presence.

Not that she was going to think about him and what she’d agreed to in the silence of that hallway, caged against the wall by his intense, demanding heat. That felt wrong, especially given she was in the same room as the man she’d been going to marry one day. And still would if he ever woke up.

Except that day was getting harder and harder to imagine, especially now that this infection was proving stubbornly resistant to treatment.